Itís not unusual for magazines to get in trouble for manipulating or
otherwise misusing a celebrityís image without her consent. But this time,
the magazine in question, Redbook,
has irked the wrong celebrity ó and it stands to pay a heavy price in lost
circulation.
"Friends" star JenniferAniston
is furious with
Redbook for putting what she
claims is an unauthorized and heavily doctored photograph of her on the
cover
of its June issue.The actress, who is unrivaled among
Hollywood royalty in her power to drive newsstand sales, accuses the
magazine of cobbling together the unflattering shot from several different
file photos.Aniston's
publicist, Steven Huvane, says the star, who appeared on Redbook
as recently as last September, won't be doing so again. Moreover, he says,
Aniston
is considering all options available to her, including legal action
against Redbook
and its publisher, Hearst."She didn't pose for them and she didn't do the
interview, and that picture is a compilation of several images," says
Huvane.No, it's not, says Redbook.
"The photo was taken while Jennifer
was on tour promoting 'The Good Girl,'" the magazine said in a statement,
referring to her 2002 film. "The only things that were altered in the
cover
photo were the color of her shirt and the length of her hair, very
slightly, in order to reflect her current length."Anistonís
rep challenges that explanation.
"Look at the picture -- the head is a lot larger than the body," says
Huvane.He claims that the head, hair and body in the
cover
shot all came from different sources, with the body apparently lifted from
a photo taken of Aniston
in 1999 for the teen site Voxxy.com. "It's hard to tell because the
photo's so doctored," he says.Word of the dispute first broke in the new issue of
Us Weekly. According to that item, Aniston
even questioned whether all the body parts assembled in the photograph
were hers to begin with.(Hearst insists that they
were.)
There's more than just hurt feelings at stake here.
More than any other star, Aniston's
appearance on the cover
of a women's magazine is a virtual guarantee of a surge in newsstand
sales.
Last year,
Aniston appeared on the cover
of InStyle's best-selling issue of the year in September, Vogue's
best-selling August issue and, with husband Brad Pitt, on Redbook's
top-selling September issue, says Steve Cohn, editor of Media Industry
Newsletter, which tracks issue-by-issue newsstand results.
"She's clearly the champ," says Cohn.
What's more, he says, Aniston
has been a perennial bestseller since 1996.
"She has
cover legs, you might say, in
terms of endurance."
The only other female star with comparable power to move magazines in
recent years has been Oprah Winfrey, who these days largely limits her
cover
appearances to her own magazine.
Asked whether his client would consider posing for Redbook again in the foreseeable future,
Huvane says, "I don't think that's likely."She will,
however, continue to consider requests from other Hearst titles.
Accusations of photo altering cropped up earlier this year with a
report in Women's Wear Daily that Harper's Bazaar had grafted actress Kate
Winslet's head onto the body of its fashion director for its January
issue.
The magazine denied the substitution, saying the staffer had only stood
in to get the lighting right. The following month, Winslet herself
complained when the British edition of GQ digitally altered her legs in a
cover
photo to make them look slimmer.
There's some irony in Us editor in chief Bonnie Fuller calling
attention to another magazine's unauthorized use of a celebrity's image.
Three years ago, Fuller, then editor of Glamour, drew the ire of Vogue
editor Anna Wintour when she placed a two-year old photo of Catherine
Zeta-Jones on the cover
a month before the actress was scheduled to appear on the cover
of Vogue. Wintour's lingering pique over the incident is said to have
contributed to Fuller's firing from Conde Nast the following year.

NEW YORK -- If you noticed that Julia Roberts '
head is slapped on the wrong body on the
cover
of the new
Redbook , you've got a sharp
set of eyes.

In fact, Roberts and other Hollywood A-listers
are fuming over altered magazine covers that look bizarre at best and
disproportionately freakish at worst.

It's known as airbrushing,
or digital manipulation. At magazines, it's standard practice to zap a
zit, or brighten those baby blues. It's even de rigueur for a supermodel
like Tyra Banks , whose flawless printed perfection is at odds with her
actual persona, and comes at a price.

"I disappoint people who meet me in person
because I don't look like me," Banks says. "But the public is really hard
on people in the industry, and your image has to be perfect, and I openly
admit that I have cellulite and I get that touched off."

But, as those who do the tweaking point out,
there's a huge difference between eradicating stretch marks and cutting
body parts from two separate photos and fusing them together into a
composite shot, as
Redbook did with Roberts in
its July issue and a clipped-together JenniferAniston
in June. Magazines run such doctored shots to give their covers an air of
exclusivity and originality, even when celebs don't grant the magazine an
interview or sit for a photo shoot, as was the case with Aniston.

"It's not immoral to retouch people, and everyone
does it," says Rolling Stone art director Andy Cowles. "The difficulty is
when you mess with the truth, when it's distorted and done to the point
where you can see it and the person doesn't look real."

A spate of recentcover
scandals proves his point.

The
cover:
On Redbook
's July cover,
Roberts' head comes from a paparazzi shot taken at the 2002 People's
Choice awards. Her body, meanwhile, is from the Notting Hill movie
premiere four years ago.

The
commotion: Although this cover
was put to bed before the Aniston
issue hit stands, it doesn't bode well for a magazine that, like its
competitors, relies on celebs such as Aniston,
Roberts and Gwyneth Paltrow to move major copies.

The
conclusion: Publisher Hearst admits its mistake: "In an effort to make a
cover
that would pop on the newsstand, we combined two different shots of Julia
Roberts. We acknowledge that we may have gone too far and hope that Ms.
Roberts will accept our apology." Roberts' publicist, Marcy Engelman,
simply says that "it's a shame they didn't use the body that went with the
head, because it was a great Giorgio Armani pantsuit" that she wore to the
People's Choice awards.

The
cover:
Redbook
's June issue promised the real scoop on Aniston's
relationship with hubby Brad Pitt . But the article was a clip job and the
oddly flat cover
photo's exact origins still mystify Aniston's
publicist Stephen Huvane. He says he declined a Redbookcover
because Aniston
had a commitment to Harper's Bazaar . Redbook
informed him eight weeks before the cover
hit that she'd be on it, anyway.

The commotion: "It's a combination of three
pictures," says Huvane of the photo. "If you're going to do it, then at
least match her head up to her body, and make the neck look like it
belongs to her. I still can't figure out which exact picture the face came
from." A Redbook
spokeswoman refutes his statements: "The only things that were altered in
the cover
photo were the color of her shirt and the length of her hair, very
slightly, in order to reflect her current length."

The
conclusion: Huvane says Aniston
is mulling legal action. "She's doesn't like the blatant manipulation of
her image," he says.

The
cover:
Seventeen 's May issue featured Sarah Michelle Gellar , who granted the
magazine an interview but not a photo shoot. So the magazine purchased a
retouched photo from a syndication house, changed Gellar's shirt color
(from black to purple) -- a standard practice at most magazines, including
Rolling Stone -- and somehow made her left hand look unnaturally long and
misshapen.

The
commotion: Gellar's camp was displeased, stating that she looked like a
paper cutout, not a real three-dimensional person, and that the printing
job was poor quality.

The
conclusion: The magazine sent Gellar a nice thank-you gift, and the furor
has since died down.

The
cover:
When the February issue of British GQ hit stands, Kate Winslet 's
legs looked stunningly slim. And no, the actress, who has publicly railed
against Hollywood's obsession with skinniness, hadn't gone on a crash
diet.

The commotion: Winslet said her gams had been
thinned down by a third. "I was pretty proud of how my legs actually
looked in the real picture," said Winslet at the time. "I have Polaroids
from the shoot and I thought I looked fine."

The conclusion: Editor in chief Dylan Baker
admitted that the photo had been altered, but said it was with Winslet's
approval. The actress is not outraged, but says she spoke out because "it
just was important to me to let people know that digital retouching
happens all the time. It's probably happened to just about every other
well-known actress on the face of the planet."